Saturday, May 8, 2010

Since the onset of the great recession in 2008 we've been nagged by the statists of the liberal-left on how it all represented a failure of capitalism. How the greed and inherently corrupt nature of unbridled free markets plunged us into the fiscal mess we are struggling to emerge from.

So, does what is happening in Greece and the greater Eurozone represent a failure of socialism?

Free healthcare, free housing, mandatory employment are all wonderful things because they are "rights", correct? They're all rights, because a truly compassionate society would view them as nothing less, correct?

But the money to fund all those rights has to come from somewhere. Someone in that society that is a creator of wealth is footing the bill for those rights enjoyed by everybody else.

And here is the theoretical problem with that arrangement. That compassion becomes confiscatory meaning the more rights you willy-freaking-nilly start making up, the more of a burden you put on the wealth-creators in your society to fund those rights. Since those rights come in the form of mandatory goods and services, so to does the obtaining of the money to fund those rights becomes mandatory. In short, this is the slavery of socialism.

And the practical problem with this arrangement is that the more "rights" you start granting the people, the quicker the money runs out. Margaret Thatcher was right: the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. In a nutshell, this is what is happening in Greece and the greater Eurozone.

Against our nature, we've been pessimistic with regard to our economy fearing a double-dip recession as a result of the Obama regime's horribly misguided demand-side Keynesian gimmickry. Perhaps, though, we've been looking at this the wrong way. Maybe we, as an electorate, might look at the situation in Greece and take some heartfelt lessons-learned.

•The entitlement society is D-E-A-D, dead, dead, dead. It may thrash around a bit more, but it is dead. Here in the US, we'll continue to get Obama and Waxman and Frank and Pelosi pitching for more and more entitlements, but as wreckage and ruin spreads across Europe from demographic decay and socialist entitlements, only those who believe in compassion™ with religious faith will continue demanding more.

Read the rest of KT's post, here. We're still chewing on it but we dig the optimism and the implied faith in this country, though we stray off path from time to time, to eventually get things right.